Two Little Birds

John loved to buy things for the house; he had a real eye for it. He would sit on the computer for hours looking for his next big deal. A carved wooden headboard; a Turkish rug, a polished birch foot stall; a little silver teapot that stood on four legs. Exotic articles from distant lands. Whenever the packages arrived he would jump from foot to foot with excitement, and Alison would follow him from one room to another as he decided where they would go.

The rooms were becoming quite cluttered with all of John’s purchases. With each new thing he bought the house felt less like hers. The house felt too big for just two people. The girls had both grown up now, had hopped from the nest on eager legs. Alison quite often pictured them in her head as birds. They had always been little bony things; with sharp elbows and spines that stuck out like hard round marbles under their skin.

When they were younger she would gather up their sharp little limbs in her arms and squeeze them tightly. They hated when she did that and would push against her embrace like small birds flapping their wings. She sometimes worried she would hold them too tightly, and they would break. They always seemed so easily broken, so devastatingly transient.

Lucy had left only about a year ago; she was living in London now, studying media at university. Alison and John had gone to visit her twice, and in July Alison had gone by herself. She’d taken an early train and met Lucy at Victoria Station. Alison felt invisible amongst the crowds of people. She chose a spot by a pastry shop where there was a corner of clean looking floor and sat down with her legs drawn up to her chest.

Alison had been very upset when Lucy left. For weeks she had found herself quite overcome with emotion. It could happen at any time; in the queue at the supermarket, peeling vegetables for dinner, when she was weeding in the garden; crouched down amongst the cabbages and potatoes. She would be over taken quite suddenly with sadness. The grief felt like an animal inside of her, scratching at her bones and pushing at the inside of her skin, desperate to escape. She would surprise herself with the noises she made, high piercing wails, and dry throaty groans that would hang in the air around her.

John had caught her crying a few times, and would sit with her, stroking her back with a kind of clumsy affection. He would ask her what was wrong again and again, but she couldn’t tell him. Eventually he would get frustrated with her, when she inevitably failed to stop crying. ‘Alison, please’ he would say, ‘pull yourself together!’ For the first time since they had been married, she started to feel awkward around him. She worried about what they were going to say to each other when they were alone. Sometimes the sound of knife and forks clinking together; and wet slap of his lips at dinner time would be too much for her, and she would run from the room.

When she spoke with her friends she turned her despair into amusing anecdotes. She laughed at what she called her self-indulgent wailing, made light of her mood swings. For sometimes it was not grief that she felt, but a sort of hopeless joy that sent bubbles of overwhelming happiness through her body. She was overcome by such a mood once when walking to the supermarket, and before realising what she was doing, began to run. She spread her arms out as if she could take off at any time, the wind rushed through her hair, and she felt as though she weighed nothing at all.  

Sometimes at the end of the day, when she and John were preparing to go to bed she would long for him as she hadn’t for years. She would go up behind him as he brushed his teeth in their bathroom mirror, watching her reflection as she wrapped her arms around him. She saw a woman of around 50, with hair that was streaked with silver curls. She always wore a bra to bed and the thin satin straps cut into the fleshy skin of her shoulders. She knew every wrinkle of her face intimately, she knew the creases around her eyes and mouth, knew the sagging skin around her chin. But in the dim light of the bathroom, she couldn’t see them. She just saw a woman, with her arms wrapped around a man, holding him as if he might disappear at any moment.  

Alison got it into her head that she wanted to travel. She started picking up travel magazines from the supermarket and gazing at the turquoise waters and golden dunes of the deserts. She got a sense that she was the tiniest dot in the spectrum of the planet. She liked the idea that she was so tiny, so inconsequential; it made her feel reckless. John didn’t like the idea of travelling. ‘At our age, Alison?’ he’d say, ‘Where would we get the money? And what about the house, we couldn’t just leave it, now could we?’

Once or twice every month, Alison and John would go round to their neighbours for dinner. Liz was Alison’s closest friend; they had known each other ever since they were pregnant with their first babies. Jan’s husband Mike was a short serious man; he played golf in competitions and arranged his trophies up on the mantelpiece. He and John would sit in the conservatory with a bottle of beer and discuss the finer points of the game. Liz and Alison liked to put on Joni Mitchell in the next room, they drank glasses of red wine and talked about their husbands. Alison told Liz that she felt invisible; Liz told Alison that she had found emails from a woman on Mike’s computer. ‘And do you know the thing that really gets me,’ she said, ‘was that what stupid woman would be bothering to email that boring idiot.’    

And right there, in Liz’s tidy cream living room, with Joni Mitchell singing from the speakers, the two of them sat at Mike’s computer and booked two plane tickets to India. And later when Liz had bought out the main course, and the four of them were sitting at the dinner table, the two women caught each other’s eye and laughed. They laughed so hard that their stomachs ached and tears rolled down their cheeks. They flapped their arms and banged the tables with their fists, and the men, with shaking heads and creased brows, looked on in amazement.